Francisco jimenez breaking through summary

Selected Reviews of Breaking Through

Hazel Rochman, Booklist Editor’s Choice, September 6, 2001

“Jimenez autobiographical story The Circuit (1997) broke new ground with its drama of a Mexican American migrant child in southern California.

It won many prizes and was a booklist Editors’ Choice. This moving sequel is a fictionalized memoir of Jimenez’s teenage years in the late 1950’s, when the family finally stayed in one place and Francisco and his brothers worked long hours before and after school to put food on the table.

Francisco jimenez breaking through summary

First they picked strawberries in the fields. Later the jobs got better: cleaning offices, washing windows and walls, waxing floors. The prose here is not as taut as in the first book, but Jimenez writes with simplicity about a harsh world seldom seen in children’s books.

He also writes about a scary, sad, furious, and broken father – like the father in Na’s A Step from Heaven [BKL Je 1 & 1501]. He stays true to the viewpoint of